DocsFlow accelerates annual report production at literacy project

In general, we’re happy to donate software to qualified educational institutions (for teaching applications) and to non-profit organizations, and we did so for Wisconsin Literacy a few months ago. Sheila McGrath kindly reports back with a very positive review of using DocsFlow with InDesign for their annual report production.

Thank you so much for giving us DocsFlow. Wisconsin Literacy produced their annual report using DocsFlow, with me as an off-site volunteer graphic designer.

(Click on the annual report cover for the full pdf version.)

DocsFlow for CS4 worked very well for flowing text into InDesign. I was not able to get custom style-mapping to work automatically (likely an older Mac Javascript version on my machine rather than a DocsFlow problem) but I had no problem importing text into InDesign smoothly. I just re-imported text after changes and my styles were retained, so all was well. The Links panel indications of file changes worked fine also.

It was much easier and faster than any previous publication we produced. Although we only do a few print publications per year, our earlier process using e-mailed versions of Word doc text for import and pdfs for proofing layouts has always been time consuming and less reliable. I am hoping that Wisconsin Literacy will expand DocsFlow and InDesign use as staff and volunteers become more familiar with using GoogleDocs for editing.

For me, as a designer who volunteers my time for this work, DocsFlow is wonderful. I have posted positively about it on InDesign Secrets, and hope that other organizations like Wisconsin Literacy will adopt the process for publications.